The political disquiet around the Harper government’s intervention in the CP Rail labour dispute is not limited to the ranks of the opposition parties.

Some Conservative MPs who voted through back-to-work legislation were also uncomfortable about the rush to get involved.

“This is quite different from Air Canada, which could have gone bankrupt and stranded tens of thousands of people,” said one MP.

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“We should let the process run its course. If they don’t find a solution in the medium term – say two to three weeks – then step in. It’s only been a week.”

‘Expectations are outpacing reality and the result is growing frustration – fertile ground for opposition parties’

The government’s concern is that Canadian Pacific is the backbone of the Canadian economy. There’s no doubt a service shut-down would quickly hit automakers like Toyota and General Motors, not to mention grain producers, miners and forestry companies.

Denis Lebel, the transport minister, said CP carries $135-million of goods a day and a work stoppage would block Canada’s exports.

But CP is a robust company that made nearly $700-million in profit last year and can fight its own battles. An extended strike would have been unlikely, judging by the amount of business at stake, and the two sides would probably have reached a settlement in short order.

Will the government step in again, if the unions balk at the plans by CP’s new management to cut jobs and costs?

Canada Post appears to have been a point, Air Canada a trend and Canadian Pacific a pattern. Employers need not bother negotiating in good faith, safe in the knowledge the government will step in on their side, like some school yard bully.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Part of the problem with this approach is that it settles nothing, merely pushing off the dispute into the court system, where both previous disputes remain in the hands of arbitrators.

‘The pendulum is in danger of swinging to the other extreme, where workers have no voice or influence’

Even employers may not end up happy at the end of the arbitration process if, like CP, they are looking for structural changes such as pension reform. Arbitrators rarely make profound decisions, even those appointed by the Conservatives.

Unions are guilty of too often putting their narrow, sectional interests ahead of the greater good.

Thankfully, in the private sector at least, the union movement is much diminished. But the pendulum is in danger of swinging to the other extreme, where workers have no voice or influence. Government is refusing labour its legal right to strike and distorting the collective bargaining process.

In the CP dispute, the Teamsters union is fighting to avoid dilution to the defined-benefit plan of its existing members, hardly Animal Farm.

As Doug Finnson, the union’s vice-president said, “If they took the pension demand off the table, they’d probably get a deal.”

There may be political implications to jumping in too early.

This is the Conservative Party’s lookout, but they have opened up yet another front at a time when the latest opinion polls show them already trailing the New Democratic Party.

There are 4.6 million union members in Canada and even though the NDP polled 4.5 million votes last year, it’s a good bet they didn’t all vote orange.

The Conservative coalition that won the majority was built in large part on appealing to the middle class “battlers” — the Tim Hortons crowd, who fight through the adversity of low pay, family commitments and high taxes to meet their commitments.

Yet these are some of the same people who are now finding their pensions under attack, their savings dwindling and their debts rising. Expectations are outpacing reality and the result is growing frustration – fertile ground for opposition parties.

Opinion polls last summer suggested a majority of people backed the government’s use of back-to-work legislation in the Canada Post and Air Canada cases. One suspects that, like some Conservative MPs, there is less certainty the action is justified in this case.

Lisa Raitt, the Labour Minister, said the government still supports collective bargaining, but its actions contradict that position.

You don’t need, necessarily, to buy the Supreme Court of Canada’s contention that collective bargaining is a human right to support the idea it is the most efficient means of settling labour disputes.

Government intervention just doesn’t sit well. As the conservative writer Roger Scruton once said: “The true business of law is not to boss people around but to reconcile their differences.”

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